Me

I was a child writer-dreamer who never strayed far from that path. Today I’m the award-winning author of 21 books, with two more set to come. I am also a partner in Juncture Workshops. I'm privileged to teach creative nonfiction at the University of Pennsylvania, where I received the 2015 Beltran Family Award for Innovative Teaching & Mentoring. I love writing about the intersection of place and memory for the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER. I am honored to review literature for the CHICAGO TRIBUNE. Always and most importantly, I am privileged to be a mom. My work has been or is being translated into sixteen languages. All content Copyright 2007-2016 Beth Kephart Books.

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HANDLING THE TRUTH: on the making of memoir

Winner, Books for a Better Life/Motivational Award. Named Top Writing Book by Poets and Writers. Featured in O Magazine. Starred Reviews from Library Journal and Kirkus, a Top Ten September Book at BookPage. For more on this book please tap the image.

six mini memoir lectures

If you, like me, are a memoir nerd, you might enjoy this series of themed thoughts on great memoirists and the making of memoir. Click on the link for the discount code. Bonus material: a behind-the-scenes look at the making of these videos, in Cleaver Magazine.

This Is the Story of You

"This beautifully written book works on many levels and is rich in its characterization, emotion, language, and hint of mystery." SLJ Starred Review. “A masterful exploration of nature's power to shake human foundations, literal and figurative.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review. "Kephart (One Stolen Thing) establishes relatable characters and a poetic style that artfully blend the island days before and after the storm.” — Publishers Weekly. A Junior Library Guild and Scholstic Book Club selection. Chronicle Books. Click on the image to learn more.

LOVE: A Philadelphia Affair

"... another excellent nonfiction book for the general reader." Library Journal. LOVE is the Upper Dublin/Wissahickon Valley Libraries Let's DIscuss It Pick. More more on the book and events, click on the image.

One Thing Stolen

2016 TAYSHAS Reading List, Parents' Choice Gold Medal Selection. Shelf Awareness Starred Review. Booklist Starred Review: "An enigmatic, atmospheric, and beautifully written tale." "Kephart at her poetic and powerful best. ONE THING STOLEN is a masterwork—a nest of beauty and loss, a flood of passion so sweet one can taste it. This is no ordinary book. It fits into no box. It is its own box—its own language." — A.S. King. Amazon Editor's April Pick. Top 14 Teen April Novel, by Bustle. Find out more about this Florence novel, due out from Chronicle Books in April 2015, by clicking on the image.

Going Over

GOING OVER is a 2014 Booklist Editors' Choice, the Gold Medal Winner/Historical Fiction/Parents' Choice Awards, an ABA Best Books for Children & Teens, 2015 TAYSHAS Reading List, YALSA BFYA selection, a Junior Library Guild selection,voted as a 100 Children's Books to Read in a Lifetime, a Booklist Top Ten Historical Novel for Youth, a School Library Journal Pick of the Day, an Amazon Big Spring Book, an iBooks Spring's Biggest Book, and has received starred reviews from Booklist, School Library Journal, and Shelf Awareness.. Click on the image for more information.

FLOW: Now available as a paperback!

"There is no more profound or moving exploration of Philadelphia’s history."—Nathaniel Popkin Originally released in 2007, Flow is now available as an affordable paperback. More on this book—the autobiography of a Philadelphia river—can be found by clicking on the image.

Nest. Flight. Sky.

NOW AVAILABLE through Audibles."... strives to give all those who grieve the hope that there is peace, a peace that we can live with and thrive with, as long as we remember to breathe and be alive." — Savvy Verse and Wit. Click the link to get your copy for just $2.99

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Friday, September 11, 2015

The reason it can take me so long to write a single sentence is because I care so much, even in the very first draft, about that single sentence.

This, many might say, is a writerly handicap. Just get the story down, they say. Return to it later, they say. Trust the process.

I do return, later. I do write over that sentence, away from that sentence, disappointed with that sentence. But every single time I write a sentence, or rewrite it, or reclaim it from the trash can, I am hoping for nothing less than sentence that is excellently good.

Writing well, every time, is an eternal hope of mine. I have not cracked that egg.

(Even at the very end of the process, when the book is in galleys, I discover sentences that don't work. Or, an editor with a keen eye questions me about passages that had long seemed set in stone. This just happened, in fact, with THIS IS THE STORY OF YOU. We were in galleys. We thought (after finding several troublesome galley matters) that we were done. But Taylor Norman, reading the book with fresh eyes, stopped, thought, and asked: Do you want your "really" here? Is that double "rappel" intentional? Can't we relax her speech on this page? What do you mean, the wind is incidental? Can she call her mother "Mom"? Look. I wrote this book. I'd read it dozens of times. And I didn't see this stuff. It's an ongoing process, refining one's work. And I suspect we're never really done.)

Over the last 24 hours I've read two favorite writers—novelist Colm Toibin and nonfiction genius John McPhee—on the art of getting it right the first time, and then looking again. I share their perspectives here. I learn from both.

BNR: I’m interested in your writing process, because much of the power, particularly in Nora,
comes from what isn’t said. There is a lot of inference — with her
relationship with her mother — for instance. So I was wondering how you
refined this, what is your editing process like?CT: Oh, there’s no editing process. I mean, you just
write down what’s needed — what you think is needed. And while I may
change words, or pluck things, I mean not much. There’s no actual
editing process.BNR: So you don’t write then cut?CT: No, you see, that won’t work, because if you
don’t get it down right the first time, I mean — it doesn’t mean you
don’t have to do editing or re-reading, re-writing, but not editing;
meaning I’ll write this long and later on I’ll make it short, that won’t
work. That won’t work.
I mean, well, there are writers who do drafts, knowing there will be later drafts, and that works for them, but I don’t do that. It doesn’t mean that there won’t be later drafts, but I write as though I will never get another chance.

Now here is John McPhee in a New Yorker piece called" Omission: Choosing what to leave out." He too is talking about the importance of selection, in the first paragraph. In the second (non-contiguous) paragraph, he is reflecting on greening, a process he teaches his students:

Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to
choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language.
Now keep going. What is your next word? Your next sentence, paragraph,
section, chapter? Your next ball of fact. You select what goes in and
you decide what stays out. At base you have only one criterion: If
something interests you, it goes in—if not, it stays out. That’s a crude
way to assess things, but it’s all you’ve got. Forget market research.
Never market-research your writing. Write on subjects in which you have
enough interest on your own to see you through all the stops, starts,
hesitations, and other impediments along the way....

Green 4 does not mean lop off four lines at the bottom, I tell them. The
idea is to remove words in such a manner that no one would notice that
anything has been removed. Easier with some writers than with others.
It’s as if you were removing freight cars here and there in order to
shorten a train—or pruning bits and pieces of a plant for reasons of
aesthetics or plant pathology, not to mention size. Do not do violence
to the author’s tone, manner, nature, style, thumbprint. Measure
cumulatively the fragments you remove and see how many lines would be
gone if the prose were reformatted. If you kill a widow, you pick up a
whole line.

Toibin and McPhee—two writers working two genres—are, in different ways, talking about the same thing: caring. There's a discipline to writing that may not seem so glamorous. There's more to this than just concocting story or throwing out an inventive phrase. We select, we refine, we work to get it right. Perfection may be out of reach. But we're lost when our commitment fades.